I did all of the texturing for this project using ZBrush’s Projection Master and ZBrush’s Zapplink plug in. Zapplink is a cool little projection texturing tool which links ZBrush up with external 2D paint programs. In this case, I used it with Photoshop. You can see from the screen-grabs just how cool this little plug-in is. The hair was created using a texture with alpha and carefully placed polygons (Fig.06 & 07).

To get the moody setting I wanted for this project, I knew I had to be strategic with the lights and camera. For the camera, I went with a low angle and rotated the camera a bit to get a little confusion across to the viewer. To get the atmospheric shadow I used a light with Renderman shadow attributes, and simply placed it in front of the creep and the wall.

I’ve quickly become a huge fan of Renderman for Maya. The speed at which it renders displacements is insane. A lot of the Renderman options are set in the attribute editor. The first thing I did to get the scene ready for Renderman was set all the objects in the scene to be rendered as Subd’s. This is done by selecting the object, going to the attribute editor, and setting the Renderman option to subd scheme. I also set the shader node to use sub surface scattering. In the rendering options I turned on raytracing and also added an environment light for a little global illumination. I also set the Shading Rate down to 1.0 (the lower the better) (Fig.08-11).